Flickr Shapefiles are a set of polygons generated from the geo-tags of photos on Flickr. Using the names assigned by people to their own images the dataset offers boundaries of loads of places around the world. The code.flickr blog has more info and details of their generation. The idea is that using people’s tags of locations to form boundaries gives a large dataset of where people think particular places are.

The Boundaries project uses Flick Shapefiles to show neighbourhoods and their neighbouring places. Other than that there isn’t a huge amount of examples on the web. I’ve put together an example that uses ModestMaps and the Flickr API to display the Shapefiles in Flash. The polygons are retrieved using a bounding box query to the Flickr API, decoded from JSON, drawn and may be identified with a mouse hover.

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on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under General, Geography, Mapping.
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